My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the delays associated with establishing multilingual domain names (often referred to as internationalized domain names).  Since their inception, domain names have been largely confined to ASCII text, based on a Roman character set used in the English language.  While this works well for people familiar with those characters, thousands of other language characters – from French accents to the Greek alphabet to Japanese Kanji – are not represented.  This creates a significant access barrier for non-English speakers, who are forced to use the Roman characters for most aspects of their Internet addressing.

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